Much of this advice can be summarised as “quality over quantity”: have less stuff, but better stuff. I’m going through something like this at the moment, gradually, since I may be expected to travel for work and have no fixed abode for a while. It makes me really appreciate some of the technical advances in recent years, such as the ability to carry a complete music collection and library on a hard drive.

I have to thank you for this and other treats. I have been gobbling your trail of crumbs for a while now, and I believe that you have immeasurably enriched my life…I’ve been a fan of Sterling’s since the 80’s and I love where he’s going and how he thinks…I adore the notion of ‘dark euphoria’ and the overarching sensation I get from the images on his ‘Studies in Atemporality’ flickr set is that there seems to be a widespread synchronous effort to dilate time somehow…that the impulse to reach toward immortality is growing stronger…we’re looking for what resonates in the cultural accretion…Stephenson had some interesting things to say in The Diamond Age, about how, in an effort to preserve what we value of the past, we begin to reject the future and fracture into ever-narrowing foci in a frantic search for Our People…What’s really interesting is that the more sophisticated and varied our inputs and outputs become, the closer we may feel we come to finding Them. Which, I think, might be a spectacular con.

[…] is the latter part of the end keynote that Bruce Sterling gave at the ReBoot conference. [via Warren Ellis] It’s his take on where we’re heading ideologically and how we can find value in life. He does […]